For D. L.
I
I think that night’s our balance,
our counterweight-a blind woman
we turn to for nothing but dark.
………..
In Val-Mont I see a slab of parchment,
a black quill pen in stone.
In a sculptor’s garden
there was a head made from stone,
large as a room, the eyes neatly hooded,
staring out with a crazed somnolence
fond of walled gardens.
………..
The countesses arch like cats in chateaux
they wake up as countesses and usually sleep with counts.
Nevertheless, he writes them painful letters
thinking of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Gaspara Stampa.
With Kappus he calls forth the stone in the rose.
………..
In Egypt the dhows sweep the Nile
with ancient sails. I am in Egypt,
he thinks, this Baltic jew. It is hot,
how can I make bricks with no straw?
His own country rich with food and slaughter,
fit only for sheep and generals.
………..
He thinks of this coffin of the East,
of the tiers of dead in Venice,
those countless singulars.
At lunch the baked apple too sweet with kirsch
becomes the tongues of convent girls at gossip;
under the drum and shadow of pigeons
the girl at promenade has almond in her hair.
………..
From Duino, beneath the mist,
the green is so dark and green it cannot bear itself.
In the night, from black paper
I cut the silhouette of an exiled god,
finding him as the bones of a fish in stone.
II
In the cemetery the grass is pale
fake green as if dumped out of an Easter basket
from overturned clay and the deeper marl
which sits in wet gray heaps by the creek.
There are no frogs, death drains there.
Landscape of glass, perhaps Christ
will quarry you after the worms;
the newspaper says caskets float in leaky vaults.
Above me I feel paper birds, the sun’s a brass bell.
This is not earth I walk across
but the pages of some giant magazine.
………..
Come song,
allow me some eloquence,
good people die.
………..
The June after you died
I dove down into a lake;
the water turned to cold, then colder,
and ached against my ears.
I swam under a sunken log then paused,
letting my back rub against it
like some huge fish with rib cage
and soft belly open to the bottom.
I saw the light shimmering far above
but I did not want to rise.
………..
It was so far up from the dark
once it was night three days,
after that four, then six, and over again.
The nest was torn from the tree,
the tree from the ground,
the ground itself sinking torn.
I envied the dead their sleep of rot.
I was a fable to myself,
a speech to become meat.
III
In Nevada I sat on a boulder at twilight
I had no ride and I wanted to avoid the snakes.
I watched the full moon rise a fleshy red
out of the mountains, out of a distant sandstorm.
I thought then if I might travel deep enough
I would embrace the dead as equals,
not in their separate stillnesses as dead,
but in music, one with another’s harmonies.
The moon became paler,
rising, floating upwards in her arc,
and I with her, intermingled in her whiteness,
until at dawn again she bloodied
herself with earth.
………….
In the beginning I trusted in spirits,
slight things, those of the dead in procession,
the household gods in mild delirium
with their sweet round music and modest feasts.
Now I listen only to that hard black core,
a ball harsh as coal, rending for light
far back in my own sour brain.
…………….
The tongue knots itself,
a cramped fist of music;
the oracle a white, walled room of bone
which darkens now with a greater dark;
and the brain a glacier of blood,
inching forward, sliding,
the bottom silt covered but sweet,
becoming a river now,
laving the skull with coolness
the leaves on her surface
dipping against the bone.
……………..
Voyager, the self the voyage
dark let me open your lids.
Night stares down with her great bruised eye.
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